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A Collapse of Horses
A stuffed bear beats with the rhythm of a dead baby’s heart; a crew on a space mission are dying of exposure to alien dust and at the hands of a killer among them; and a town keeps receding to the east as a man travels back to the father who drove him away.
In these stories, Brian Evenson unsettles us with the everyday and the extraordinary—the terror of living with the knowledge of all we cannot know.
Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen works of fiction. He has been a finalist for the Edgar Award and the Shirley Jackson Award, and has won an International Horror Guild Award and American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at CalArts.
‘Evenson’s fiction is stark and often jaw-droppingly funny…Some of the stories here evoke Kafka, some Poe, some Beckett, some Roald Dahl, and one, a demonic teddy-bear chiller called “BearHeart™” even Stephen King, but Evenson’s deadpan style always estranges them a bit from their models: He tells his odd tales oddly, as if his mouth were dry and the words won’t come out right.’ New York Times
‘There is not a more intense, prolific or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson.’ George Saunders
‘Evenson’s fiction is equal parts obsessive, experimental and violent. It can be soul-shaking.’ New Yorker
‘Brian Evenson is one of the treasures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes and Co., but also to Edgar Allan Poe.’ Jonathan Lethem
‘One of the most provocative, inventive and talented writers we have working today.’ Believer
231 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 18, 2016
About the author
Brian Evenson
282 books1,652 followersBrian Evenson is an American academic and writer of both literary fiction and popular fiction, some of the latter being published under B. K. Evenson.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 464 reviews
March 22, 2016
I recently attended a Brian Evenson reading held at Skylight Books in the appropriately understated, enduringly cool east Hollywood enclave of Los Feliz. During the Q & A session after he read his latest collection's titular piece, Evenson shared a personal story that had occurred in a parking garage just days before. As he was walking to his car one afternoon, he noticed a fluttering object up ahead of him, trapped in the corner of the structure, that appeared to be a distressed bird most likely injured and unable to fly. As he drew nearer, he realized that what he was certain was a bird was actually a dead leaf, rocking back and forth in the wind. This gave him pause, and in pondering what he had just seen, or thought he had seen, he surmised that it could be possible that the bird he first saw may have physically transformed itself into the leaf that he found.
This was a quick anecdote, and seemingly innocuous, but as the discussion moved on, this visual vignette and its explanation sent my mind reeling. When we don't trust our eyes, perhaps we should. When we do trust our eyes, and what information it is relaying to our rational brain, perhaps we shouldn't. Maybe what we think we see but would never dare believe is actually what's absolutely real. Perception can be reality when reality is what we not just perceive, but truly see. Or don't. If a tree falls in the forest and you weren't there to see it, did it not fall?
Some may look upon a rocky outcropping, or a hole in the ground, or a cave, and see it for what it is in a physical sense. Some see these things as something else. Yet others can hear a sound in the woods and interpret it as the swaying of trees in the wind, or the movement of harmless animals. A different set of ears, attached to a different brain, infuse those noises with dread, and potential violence. Terror. Strips of meat hang in a cellar. What sort of meat is it? Why are they there? Is this innocuous, or is this horrific? Can it be both?
If we do not perceive something to be horrifying, it is not horrifying to us. Similarly, if we find something horrifying, ASSIGN it horror, it will be just that. We should question everything. It would be safer to question nothing.
This is heavy philosophical cargo, dealing with the heart and ephemeral soul of physical existence. But more so, these concepts examine the truth or lies of perception, shaded by interpretation, learned bias and ritualized certitude. Perception. Interpretation. Challenging rationalism through a realization of the "supernatural." A loss of control, willingly or not. Dissolution and disintegration.
Brian Evenson deals directly with these sorts of issues in his novels and especially in his short fiction, collected most recently in A Collapse of Horses, published by Coffee House Press as the fourth piece of a "cover puzzle" that also includes re-issues of Father of Lies (1999), The Open Curtain (2006), and Last Days (2009). In these seventeen tales, Evenson shows us his wide range of literary darkness, probing at all those spots that hurt and unsettle us most.
Since the mid 90's and the release of his brilliant debut collection Altmann's Tongue, Evenson's work has been widely acclaimed, celebrated within genre fiction and without, and keeping him from falling into any easily classifiable genre pigeonhole. Yet he has and continues to write some of the most vital, brutal, and unsettling fiction today. For my money, he writes horror.
In doing so, in writing these horrors, he rarely falls back on the easy crutch of "going supernatural," instead setting the table with very real forks, knives, spoons, and plates, but arranging them in such a way that you'd swear some outside force was messing with the scene, re-positioning everything in such a way as to hint of a malevolent presence engaged in disorienting us just long enough to take us down.
This strain of dark fiction - let's call it the Evenson Strain - gives volume and heat to one of the central chambers in the beating heart of contemporary literary horror, sprouting a strongly pumping artery that is leading us into this new century to deposit us on strange, unsafe shores. Great beasts (rarely) scuttle from crypts or rise from the ocean in Evenson's stories, but the horror is never more real and harmful. We are monsters and are surrounded by monsters that are sometimes less monsters than we.
Which brings us to A Collapse of Horses, an enviable title that perfectly sets the tone for the stories to come, which include the following standouts:
"Black Bark" ushers us into the collection, introducing us to Sugg and Rawley, two men on the run in the old horse American west. Sugg took a bullet in the leg, and is holding out hope for a cabin waiting just around the next bend in the trail. Instead, they settle for a cave, where a "good luck charm" has good missing from a bloody boot, and a story is told in the flickering light of a campfire. The story of black bark, found in the coat pocket of a man who had no idea how it got there. Then, later, another story is told. "'Doesn't matter much one way or the other,' said Sugg. Then he opened his mouth wide and smiled. It was a terrible thing to watch. Rawley began to be very afraid."
"A Report" reminds me of Kafka (which makes sense, considering Kafka's influence on a young Evenson, something I found out well after making this comparison), only better, soaked with the terror of imprisonment without reason, without end, and - possibly the worst part - without explanation. The tricks the mind plays, and the victims becoming the instigators.
"The Punish" explores the enduring power of childhood trespasses, performed in secret, away from adult eyes and rules, and how these actions can shape the rest of a person's life, for good and for ill. This is a tragic tale of never being allowed to forget the past, and the power of karma.
In "Cult," one cannot help but think of religious compounds, which include those founded on LDS teaching, that litter the western hinterlands of the United States. The weakness and indecision of our protagonist in dealing with an ex had me seconds from screaming at the page. Reads like a price of slightly spooky contemporary fiction, wrapped tight in personal lamentation and religious critique. Excellent.
"A Seaside Town" is - simply and crudely put - one of the best pieces of uncanny and weird fiction I've ever encountered. It reads like Ligotti on a Victorian holiday, and makes the mundane into something unsettling, threatening, dangerous. I have no idea why this story scared me so much, why the activities in the courtyard filled me with such disquiet, but they did. All of them. Stories don't frighten me much, but this one did. A masterstroke of the uncanny that left me scratching my head in grateful awe.
"The Dust" is realistic science fiction Noir, with the situation being very relatable to any locality on any planet. An insidious dust is wreaking havoc on a mining operation, quickly becoming the last of the small crews' problems as they deal with depleting oxygen and the death of one of their own. This is a longer work, a murder mystery novelette buried within a survival tale set on some nameless rock floating in the cold, airless reaches of space, and I couldn't stop turning the pages.
"BearHeart (tm)" is as harrowing tale of parenthood cut short, and the copping mechanisms employed by the grieving couple left spinning in the wake. You can see what's coming, but you don't turn away, because you can't.
"Scour" explores the delicate nature of life, the and the long, unending concept of death.
The drudgery of the afterlife. If death came for you, would you recognize it? Would you know that you're dead? Once again, dust and grit play a central role
"Past Reno" might be the second-best story in A Collapse of Horses, as it gins up dread in ways that you never thought possible, including through the unlikely vehicle of a diner bathroom mirror. This is Evenson at his very best, mining his past and those dry, western landscapes he knows so well, and the darker spaces just under the surface, where things hang from the ceiling that he doesn't want to know at all.
With "Any Corpse," Evenson veers into dark fantasy and body horror more associated with Neil Gaiman at his most ghastly, or Clive Barker on any given Sunday. This story shows impressive world-building in a strange, grisly afterlife, weaving a level of strangeness that I found comforting, even inspiring. A surprising tale, and by Evenson's own admission, one of the last two stories he added to the collection at the 11th hour before it went to print. I'm very glad it made it in.
"Click," confusion, injury, loss of memory, power of suggestion, at the mercy of larger forces that probably don't have your best interests, or your freedom, at heart - a theme that runs through this collection like a cold needle through flesh. Our protagonists could be having a bad dream or an hallucination, brought on by what appears to be a mass murder and near-suicide. But one can never know, if one cannot trust one's own brain, or the reality that it builds from the information at hand. Officials hover around a hospital bedside, bent on interrogation, obfuscation. They threaten, but don't actually harm or kill you, which might be worse. The waiting. The not knowing. The unreliability of perception, and what horror that surely lays just beneath this thin layer of what our eyes, our brain, tells us is real.
I could go on, but I feel like that would be doing you a disservice, and more importantly, times a'wasting. It's now your turn to get down into the dust next to A Collapse of Horses, close your eyes, and see where it is that you wake up, and what your brain now tells you. You might be surprised. No, strike that. You will be surprised.
This was a quick anecdote, and seemingly innocuous, but as the discussion moved on, this visual vignette and its explanation sent my mind reeling. When we don't trust our eyes, perhaps we should. When we do trust our eyes, and what information it is relaying to our rational brain, perhaps we shouldn't. Maybe what we think we see but would never dare believe is actually what's absolutely real. Perception can be reality when reality is what we not just perceive, but truly see. Or don't. If a tree falls in the forest and you weren't there to see it, did it not fall?
Some may look upon a rocky outcropping, or a hole in the ground, or a cave, and see it for what it is in a physical sense. Some see these things as something else. Yet others can hear a sound in the woods and interpret it as the swaying of trees in the wind, or the movement of harmless animals. A different set of ears, attached to a different brain, infuse those noises with dread, and potential violence. Terror. Strips of meat hang in a cellar. What sort of meat is it? Why are they there? Is this innocuous, or is this horrific? Can it be both?
If we do not perceive something to be horrifying, it is not horrifying to us. Similarly, if we find something horrifying, ASSIGN it horror, it will be just that. We should question everything. It would be safer to question nothing.
This is heavy philosophical cargo, dealing with the heart and ephemeral soul of physical existence. But more so, these concepts examine the truth or lies of perception, shaded by interpretation, learned bias and ritualized certitude. Perception. Interpretation. Challenging rationalism through a realization of the "supernatural." A loss of control, willingly or not. Dissolution and disintegration.
Brian Evenson deals directly with these sorts of issues in his novels and especially in his short fiction, collected most recently in A Collapse of Horses, published by Coffee House Press as the fourth piece of a "cover puzzle" that also includes re-issues of Father of Lies (1999), The Open Curtain (2006), and Last Days (2009). In these seventeen tales, Evenson shows us his wide range of literary darkness, probing at all those spots that hurt and unsettle us most.
Since the mid 90's and the release of his brilliant debut collection Altmann's Tongue, Evenson's work has been widely acclaimed, celebrated within genre fiction and without, and keeping him from falling into any easily classifiable genre pigeonhole. Yet he has and continues to write some of the most vital, brutal, and unsettling fiction today. For my money, he writes horror.
In doing so, in writing these horrors, he rarely falls back on the easy crutch of "going supernatural," instead setting the table with very real forks, knives, spoons, and plates, but arranging them in such a way that you'd swear some outside force was messing with the scene, re-positioning everything in such a way as to hint of a malevolent presence engaged in disorienting us just long enough to take us down.
This strain of dark fiction - let's call it the Evenson Strain - gives volume and heat to one of the central chambers in the beating heart of contemporary literary horror, sprouting a strongly pumping artery that is leading us into this new century to deposit us on strange, unsafe shores. Great beasts (rarely) scuttle from crypts or rise from the ocean in Evenson's stories, but the horror is never more real and harmful. We are monsters and are surrounded by monsters that are sometimes less monsters than we.
Which brings us to A Collapse of Horses, an enviable title that perfectly sets the tone for the stories to come, which include the following standouts:
"Black Bark" ushers us into the collection, introducing us to Sugg and Rawley, two men on the run in the old horse American west. Sugg took a bullet in the leg, and is holding out hope for a cabin waiting just around the next bend in the trail. Instead, they settle for a cave, where a "good luck charm" has good missing from a bloody boot, and a story is told in the flickering light of a campfire. The story of black bark, found in the coat pocket of a man who had no idea how it got there. Then, later, another story is told. "'Doesn't matter much one way or the other,' said Sugg. Then he opened his mouth wide and smiled. It was a terrible thing to watch. Rawley began to be very afraid."
"A Report" reminds me of Kafka (which makes sense, considering Kafka's influence on a young Evenson, something I found out well after making this comparison), only better, soaked with the terror of imprisonment without reason, without end, and - possibly the worst part - without explanation. The tricks the mind plays, and the victims becoming the instigators.
"The Punish" explores the enduring power of childhood trespasses, performed in secret, away from adult eyes and rules, and how these actions can shape the rest of a person's life, for good and for ill. This is a tragic tale of never being allowed to forget the past, and the power of karma.
In "Cult," one cannot help but think of religious compounds, which include those founded on LDS teaching, that litter the western hinterlands of the United States. The weakness and indecision of our protagonist in dealing with an ex had me seconds from screaming at the page. Reads like a price of slightly spooky contemporary fiction, wrapped tight in personal lamentation and religious critique. Excellent.
"A Seaside Town" is - simply and crudely put - one of the best pieces of uncanny and weird fiction I've ever encountered. It reads like Ligotti on a Victorian holiday, and makes the mundane into something unsettling, threatening, dangerous. I have no idea why this story scared me so much, why the activities in the courtyard filled me with such disquiet, but they did. All of them. Stories don't frighten me much, but this one did. A masterstroke of the uncanny that left me scratching my head in grateful awe.
"The Dust" is realistic science fiction Noir, with the situation being very relatable to any locality on any planet. An insidious dust is wreaking havoc on a mining operation, quickly becoming the last of the small crews' problems as they deal with depleting oxygen and the death of one of their own. This is a longer work, a murder mystery novelette buried within a survival tale set on some nameless rock floating in the cold, airless reaches of space, and I couldn't stop turning the pages.
"BearHeart (tm)" is as harrowing tale of parenthood cut short, and the copping mechanisms employed by the grieving couple left spinning in the wake. You can see what's coming, but you don't turn away, because you can't.
"Scour" explores the delicate nature of life, the and the long, unending concept of death.
The drudgery of the afterlife. If death came for you, would you recognize it? Would you know that you're dead? Once again, dust and grit play a central role
"Past Reno" might be the second-best story in A Collapse of Horses, as it gins up dread in ways that you never thought possible, including through the unlikely vehicle of a diner bathroom mirror. This is Evenson at his very best, mining his past and those dry, western landscapes he knows so well, and the darker spaces just under the surface, where things hang from the ceiling that he doesn't want to know at all.
With "Any Corpse," Evenson veers into dark fantasy and body horror more associated with Neil Gaiman at his most ghastly, or Clive Barker on any given Sunday. This story shows impressive world-building in a strange, grisly afterlife, weaving a level of strangeness that I found comforting, even inspiring. A surprising tale, and by Evenson's own admission, one of the last two stories he added to the collection at the 11th hour before it went to print. I'm very glad it made it in.
"Click," confusion, injury, loss of memory, power of suggestion, at the mercy of larger forces that probably don't have your best interests, or your freedom, at heart - a theme that runs through this collection like a cold needle through flesh. Our protagonists could be having a bad dream or an hallucination, brought on by what appears to be a mass murder and near-suicide. But one can never know, if one cannot trust one's own brain, or the reality that it builds from the information at hand. Officials hover around a hospital bedside, bent on interrogation, obfuscation. They threaten, but don't actually harm or kill you, which might be worse. The waiting. The not knowing. The unreliability of perception, and what horror that surely lays just beneath this thin layer of what our eyes, our brain, tells us is real.
I could go on, but I feel like that would be doing you a disservice, and more importantly, times a'wasting. It's now your turn to get down into the dust next to A Collapse of Horses, close your eyes, and see where it is that you wake up, and what your brain now tells you. You might be surprised. No, strike that. You will be surprised.
December 19, 2015
5 word review (not counting these words here, hidden in the parenthesis, but these stories were so weird and disturbing and burrowing, yes, burrowing, inside, inside you.)
Loved it. And blurbed it.
Here's my blurb!
“Brian Evenson's collection A Collapse of Horses is equal parts Franz Kafka, J. G. Ballard, Sam Peckinpah, and George Miller's Mad Max. His apocalyptic and paranoid stories are as ontological as they are disquieting, creating a remarkable unity of effect, a timeless yet recognizably twenty-first-century flavor of unease. A genuinely brilliant and disturbing book.”—Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Little Sleep
Loved it. And blurbed it.
Here's my blurb!
“Brian Evenson's collection A Collapse of Horses is equal parts Franz Kafka, J. G. Ballard, Sam Peckinpah, and George Miller's Mad Max. His apocalyptic and paranoid stories are as ontological as they are disquieting, creating a remarkable unity of effect, a timeless yet recognizably twenty-first-century flavor of unease. A genuinely brilliant and disturbing book.”—Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Little Sleep
March 20, 2023
Evenson does it for me every single time. Without fail. His writing style is so subtle, and somehow elevates the madness that ensues in these weird/unnerving apocalyptic, paranoid, and just flat out strange stories.
The following we’re definitely my favorite stories, but all were interesting in their own weird ways!!
Black Bark: an apocalyptic story of sorts about two men, one injured, who both rest in a cave.
Cult: a man finds himself inexorably drawn to a woman with whom he has a very toxic relationship with.
The dust: members aboard some sort of vessel are being plagued by an incessant dust that’s slowly taking over everything.
Any corpse: another apocalypse filled with strange creatures (with an unfortunate communication barrier), and the bartering of discarded bodies that drop from the sky.
The following we’re definitely my favorite stories, but all were interesting in their own weird ways!!
Black Bark: an apocalyptic story of sorts about two men, one injured, who both rest in a cave.
Cult: a man finds himself inexorably drawn to a woman with whom he has a very toxic relationship with.
The dust: members aboard some sort of vessel are being plagued by an incessant dust that’s slowly taking over everything.
Any corpse: another apocalypse filled with strange creatures (with an unfortunate communication barrier), and the bartering of discarded bodies that drop from the sky.
August 25, 2022
Every time you think you have the world figured, that's just when the world's got you figured and is about to spring and break your back.
A Collapse of Horses is a collection of unsettling and hair-raising surrealistic stories centering around the unexplained, psychological horror, paranoia and hallucinations.
I loved almost all of the stories and couldn't read the book fast enough!
A Collapse of Horses is a collection of unsettling and hair-raising surrealistic stories centering around the unexplained, psychological horror, paranoia and hallucinations.
I loved almost all of the stories and couldn't read the book fast enough!
September 14, 2017
I've made no secret of the fact that I love Brian's work; both his non-fiction and his fiction. I've published his work myself not once, but twice. I've only had the chance to meet him in person once, many years ago, but have had correspondence with him off and on for a long time now. He even let me have the honor of accepting the International Horror Guild Award on his behalf when he couldn't make it to a convention I was attending. So I might be a little biased. But only a little; even if he appears in my personal appendix N. I try to be objective when I read Brian's work, which means that, at times, I am a harsher critic than I ought to be. Then, along comes a story that entirely blows my mind and, well, there goes any semblance of objectivity or decorum, for that matter.
And what did I think of this collection? Brian's The Wavering Knife is one of my favorite single-author collections of all time, so A Collapse of Horses is up against its own stiff competition. Here are my thoughts on each story:
The structure (though not the subject matter) of "Black Bark" is reminiscent of the opening and closing sequence of the Twilight Zone movie, but much, much more scary. Wanna see something really scary? Four stars.
"A Report" is Kafka . . . *cough* *cough* Evenson at his most Kafka-esque. It's the absence of punishment that makes the torture portrayed here so excruciating. Four stars for "A Report".
"The Punish" is a story of bullying. And a story of revenge, sort of. But it doesn't play out quite how you'd expect. There is little of vengeful anger, little emotion at all, involved. At the center of it all is the sense of what's fair, what tit-for-tat comprises and how it plays out over the long term. Like much of Evenson's work, it is brutal in its lack of emotion. Five stars.
A tragedy that is not a tragedy is all the more tragic because it is not, in "A Collapse of Horses". Five stars.
"Three Indignities". Yes. Yes they are. Four cringe worthy stars that made me flinch and tremble, especially after having experienced one of them immediately after my back surgery, a few years ago. I did not care to relive that.
Using "Cult" as the title of this story may be the most clever use of a title I've seen in a while. Not the best Evenson story, but it still creeps into four star territory.
"Seaside Town" is an eerie, dissociative story that may or may not involve time travel. It reminds me of the work of Roland Topor, particularly The Tenant. A four star stay at the seaside town.
"The Dust" has a sense of paranoia that is almost palpable. It's a claustrophobic psychological horror story in a science-fictional setting. Fairly straightforward, by Evenson's standards, and yet flawlessly written to unfold a psychotic narrative that reminded me, simultaneously, of Pandorum and Carpenter's The Thing, but exactly not either of those. Four stars.
Don't judge a story by it's title! "BearHeartTM" was way less stupid and way more scary than I thought it would be from the title. Four stars, and a nod to Talky Tina.
"Scour" will . . . er, scour your soul. Evenson's ability to put the reader in the protagonist's head and cause the reader to, with her, willingly make the emotional phase shift from fear to sheer absence of will, is a draining spectacle to behold and be a part of. Four stars.
"Torpor" was a bit of grotesquery that I just didn't much care for. But you always have to admire Evenson's technically-perfect execution. Three stars.
"Past Reno" is clearly a riff on Lovecraft's idea of man's inability to correlate all the contents of the mind, along with the notion that what is off-screen is often more terrifying than what is right before you. But I've seen this done even more effectively elsewhere (though I can't for the life of me remember the title of the story that appeared in Ellen Datlow's Year's Best Fantasy and Horror that used redactions to horrifying effect - I'd be indebted if someone could help me remember what that story was and who wrote it. It was brilliant.). Still, a solid four star story.
"Any Corpse" will make you laugh, if you have as sick a sense of humor as me. I'm reminded of Evenson's Dark Property, but with a wry grin that quickly fades into a grimace. Five stars.
Many writers try to relay the feelings and sensations one encounters in a hallucinogenic experience. Evenson is one of the very, very few that actually catch the sensation of displacement that one feels during those experiences. Then he takes it two steps further, causing the reader to question reality itself in "The Moans". This is the PERFECT Evenson story, something transcendent. Five stars.
"The Window" appeared in the Fearful Symmetries anthology. Evenson hits the theme right in the middle in this ghost(?) story. Four stars.
"Click" is my new favorite Brian Evenson story. It may become one of my favorite short stories of all time. The sense of disassociative insanity is a fugue of unreliable narration, a drowning flood of swirling irrealities. I want someone to turn this into a black and white noir movie. No, not "someone". Definitely David Lynch working with the Brothers Quay. No one else could do it justice. Five gray supergiant stars!
I think I just read a Brian Evenson vampire story in "The Blood Drip". I think so, but I'm not sure. It ties in well with the opening story of the book and provides a thematic thread tying the beginning to the middle to the end, but it just didn't have the "pop" and "smarts" that I expect of Evenson's work. Three stars.
All told, that's a 4.1 average. And while I absolutely love "Click" (which should go in the end-of-the-world master textbook on how to write a short story) and "The Moans", I can't justify bumping it up to five stars. Though "The Blood Drip" and "Black Bark" bookend the collection and "A Collapse of Horses" provides a third equine leg to stand on, the various voices of the collection, the incongruous tones created by the overly-eclectic manuscripts, just didn't "bring it all together" for me. I think what we have here is two collections mashed into one: 1) stories that are more "clever" and sometimes downright funny and, 2) the more somber and grim (yet more linguistically playful) tones. My brain couldn't reconcile the two in such close proximity to each other. I appreciate both for what they are, but the two tended to repel each other, rather than pull the collection tighter together.
Still, four stars. And you're a fool if you don't rush out right now and find "Click" and "The Moans", whether in this collection or in their original incarnations. As usual, even with intervening weaknesses, Evenson proves that he is one of the greatest artists of the short story form alive today.
And what did I think of this collection? Brian's The Wavering Knife is one of my favorite single-author collections of all time, so A Collapse of Horses is up against its own stiff competition. Here are my thoughts on each story:
The structure (though not the subject matter) of "Black Bark" is reminiscent of the opening and closing sequence of the Twilight Zone movie, but much, much more scary. Wanna see something really scary? Four stars.
"A Report" is Kafka . . . *cough* *cough* Evenson at his most Kafka-esque. It's the absence of punishment that makes the torture portrayed here so excruciating. Four stars for "A Report".
"The Punish" is a story of bullying. And a story of revenge, sort of. But it doesn't play out quite how you'd expect. There is little of vengeful anger, little emotion at all, involved. At the center of it all is the sense of what's fair, what tit-for-tat comprises and how it plays out over the long term. Like much of Evenson's work, it is brutal in its lack of emotion. Five stars.
A tragedy that is not a tragedy is all the more tragic because it is not, in "A Collapse of Horses". Five stars.
"Three Indignities". Yes. Yes they are. Four cringe worthy stars that made me flinch and tremble, especially after having experienced one of them immediately after my back surgery, a few years ago. I did not care to relive that.
Using "Cult" as the title of this story may be the most clever use of a title I've seen in a while. Not the best Evenson story, but it still creeps into four star territory.
"Seaside Town" is an eerie, dissociative story that may or may not involve time travel. It reminds me of the work of Roland Topor, particularly The Tenant. A four star stay at the seaside town.
"The Dust" has a sense of paranoia that is almost palpable. It's a claustrophobic psychological horror story in a science-fictional setting. Fairly straightforward, by Evenson's standards, and yet flawlessly written to unfold a psychotic narrative that reminded me, simultaneously, of Pandorum and Carpenter's The Thing, but exactly not either of those. Four stars.
Don't judge a story by it's title! "BearHeartTM" was way less stupid and way more scary than I thought it would be from the title. Four stars, and a nod to Talky Tina.
"Scour" will . . . er, scour your soul. Evenson's ability to put the reader in the protagonist's head and cause the reader to, with her, willingly make the emotional phase shift from fear to sheer absence of will, is a draining spectacle to behold and be a part of. Four stars.
"Torpor" was a bit of grotesquery that I just didn't much care for. But you always have to admire Evenson's technically-perfect execution. Three stars.
"Past Reno" is clearly a riff on Lovecraft's idea of man's inability to correlate all the contents of the mind, along with the notion that what is off-screen is often more terrifying than what is right before you. But I've seen this done even more effectively elsewhere (though I can't for the life of me remember the title of the story that appeared in Ellen Datlow's Year's Best Fantasy and Horror that used redactions to horrifying effect - I'd be indebted if someone could help me remember what that story was and who wrote it. It was brilliant.). Still, a solid four star story.
"Any Corpse" will make you laugh, if you have as sick a sense of humor as me. I'm reminded of Evenson's Dark Property, but with a wry grin that quickly fades into a grimace. Five stars.
Many writers try to relay the feelings and sensations one encounters in a hallucinogenic experience. Evenson is one of the very, very few that actually catch the sensation of displacement that one feels during those experiences. Then he takes it two steps further, causing the reader to question reality itself in "The Moans". This is the PERFECT Evenson story, something transcendent. Five stars.
"The Window" appeared in the Fearful Symmetries anthology. Evenson hits the theme right in the middle in this ghost(?) story. Four stars.
"Click" is my new favorite Brian Evenson story. It may become one of my favorite short stories of all time. The sense of disassociative insanity is a fugue of unreliable narration, a drowning flood of swirling irrealities. I want someone to turn this into a black and white noir movie. No, not "someone". Definitely David Lynch working with the Brothers Quay. No one else could do it justice. Five gray supergiant stars!
I think I just read a Brian Evenson vampire story in "The Blood Drip". I think so, but I'm not sure. It ties in well with the opening story of the book and provides a thematic thread tying the beginning to the middle to the end, but it just didn't have the "pop" and "smarts" that I expect of Evenson's work. Three stars.
All told, that's a 4.1 average. And while I absolutely love "Click" (which should go in the end-of-the-world master textbook on how to write a short story) and "The Moans", I can't justify bumping it up to five stars. Though "The Blood Drip" and "Black Bark" bookend the collection and "A Collapse of Horses" provides a third equine leg to stand on, the various voices of the collection, the incongruous tones created by the overly-eclectic manuscripts, just didn't "bring it all together" for me. I think what we have here is two collections mashed into one: 1) stories that are more "clever" and sometimes downright funny and, 2) the more somber and grim (yet more linguistically playful) tones. My brain couldn't reconcile the two in such close proximity to each other. I appreciate both for what they are, but the two tended to repel each other, rather than pull the collection tighter together.
Still, four stars. And you're a fool if you don't rush out right now and find "Click" and "The Moans", whether in this collection or in their original incarnations. As usual, even with intervening weaknesses, Evenson proves that he is one of the greatest artists of the short story form alive today.
November 21, 2016
If Children of the New World: Stories is reminiscent of Black Mirror, A Collapse of Horses is more of a slightly grown-up, less-resolved version of the Goosebumps and Are You Afraid of the Dark stories many of us enjoyed growing up.
There are few, if any, stories in here that would be unsuitable for teenage readers, and somehow we are offered a collection that is both predictable and confusing at the same time. These stories don’t have a solid resolution, leaving it up to the reader to decide, but often to a point where this reader was left wondering what the point of many of them even was.
In the end, after reading several of these stories back to back without much in the way of resolution, it became very hard to feel any kind of connection with the characters. It felt as though, in an attempt to be artsy and different, the author made a special effort to leave the reader feeling as though they were out of their depth. For a reader who is not often surprised or left in the dark, due to the sheer volume I read, this could be seen as a plus, but rather than a new take on things, this felt like a concerted effort to leave people confused.
The rest of this review can be found HERE!
___________________________________
-- Pre-review Breakdown --
Black Bark - No Rating
No rating. I'm not sure what happened here. Super confused.
A Report - 4/5
A "moment in time" kind of story. A lot of things happening out of view of the main character, and a lot of inner monologue. Interesting way to imprison and emotionally disturb said prisoners.
The Punish - 3.5/5
Once the reader has some idea of the character's past, this story is a teensy bit predictable, but well written and enjoyable.
A Collapse of Horses - 4/5
A nice little self-contained story. It doesn't spell things out for the reader, but it seems to reach some kind of conclusion while leaving the mind to wander a little once it's complete.
Three Indignities - 3/5
Some nice imagery, but it seems a half-explored idea. It's literally about three pages long, and is about a man who has various health issues and feels disconnected and wonders what is left of the him from before.
Cult - 4/5
A good little story with a fairly solid conclusion on the ways in which victims of abuse remain under the thumb of their attacker and make excuses for them, even when they have a clean out.
Seaside Town - 2.5/5
Seems to half-explore the story, with a suggestion about something that went on but with no proper conclusion.
The Dust -3/5
It is an interesting concept, and it wraps up nicely, but there was a serious disconnect between the story and this reader.
It could be that, in a collection of stories averaging 12.18 pages, a story that is 43 pages long seems drastically longer. But, having said that, I stopped part way through this story to read a novel of more than 400 pages and devoured it in two days.
So it comes back to the story not being as engaging as it could have.
BearHeartTM - 4/5
Good imagery, a little predictable, but still a fun (and creepy-ish) read.
Scour - 4/5
No resolution, but done that way on purpose.
GORGEOUS (and slightly disturbing) imagery.
Torpor - 2/5
Huh?
I am left wondering what the whole point of that story...
The lengths people will go to for a good night's sleep?
Past Reno - 3/5
Disconcerting imagery, but it never quite got to where it was going. Unfinished and unexplained thoughts.
Any Corpse - 5/5
This one was a little confusing at times with some of the words used to describe things that aren't easy for a reader to put into physical terms, or at least the terms being used. But I really enjoyed this one. The imagery, the words, the circle.
The Moans - 3/5
Didn't really have any kind of conclusion.
The Window - 3/5
Interesting concept. Again, this didn't really have a conclusion. It was a moment in time, or an overheard conversation, in a world we're told nothing about.
Click - 4/5
Interesting concept, somewhat confusing.
Nice imagery and something of an "aha" moment.
Plays on repetition and confusion well, but not sure how it all comes together.
The Blood Drip - 3/5
Nice full-circle with the first story in the collection, but had very much given up on caring about anything by this point in the collection. Only a 12 page story, but so tempting to give call it quits on the book by this point.
There are few, if any, stories in here that would be unsuitable for teenage readers, and somehow we are offered a collection that is both predictable and confusing at the same time. These stories don’t have a solid resolution, leaving it up to the reader to decide, but often to a point where this reader was left wondering what the point of many of them even was.
In the end, after reading several of these stories back to back without much in the way of resolution, it became very hard to feel any kind of connection with the characters. It felt as though, in an attempt to be artsy and different, the author made a special effort to leave the reader feeling as though they were out of their depth. For a reader who is not often surprised or left in the dark, due to the sheer volume I read, this could be seen as a plus, but rather than a new take on things, this felt like a concerted effort to leave people confused.
The rest of this review can be found HERE!
___________________________________
-- Pre-review Breakdown --
Black Bark - No Rating
No rating. I'm not sure what happened here. Super confused.
A Report - 4/5
A "moment in time" kind of story. A lot of things happening out of view of the main character, and a lot of inner monologue. Interesting way to imprison and emotionally disturb said prisoners.
The Punish - 3.5/5
Once the reader has some idea of the character's past, this story is a teensy bit predictable, but well written and enjoyable.
A Collapse of Horses - 4/5
A nice little self-contained story. It doesn't spell things out for the reader, but it seems to reach some kind of conclusion while leaving the mind to wander a little once it's complete.
Three Indignities - 3/5
Some nice imagery, but it seems a half-explored idea. It's literally about three pages long, and is about a man who has various health issues and feels disconnected and wonders what is left of the him from before.
Cult - 4/5
A good little story with a fairly solid conclusion on the ways in which victims of abuse remain under the thumb of their attacker and make excuses for them, even when they have a clean out.
Seaside Town - 2.5/5
Seems to half-explore the story, with a suggestion about something that went on but with no proper conclusion.
The Dust -3/5
It is an interesting concept, and it wraps up nicely, but there was a serious disconnect between the story and this reader.
It could be that, in a collection of stories averaging 12.18 pages, a story that is 43 pages long seems drastically longer. But, having said that, I stopped part way through this story to read a novel of more than 400 pages and devoured it in two days.
So it comes back to the story not being as engaging as it could have.
BearHeartTM - 4/5
Good imagery, a little predictable, but still a fun (and creepy-ish) read.
Scour - 4/5
No resolution, but done that way on purpose.
GORGEOUS (and slightly disturbing) imagery.
Torpor - 2/5
Huh?
I am left wondering what the whole point of that story...
The lengths people will go to for a good night's sleep?
Past Reno - 3/5
Disconcerting imagery, but it never quite got to where it was going. Unfinished and unexplained thoughts.
Any Corpse - 5/5
This one was a little confusing at times with some of the words used to describe things that aren't easy for a reader to put into physical terms, or at least the terms being used. But I really enjoyed this one. The imagery, the words, the circle.
The Moans - 3/5
Didn't really have any kind of conclusion.
The Window - 3/5
Interesting concept. Again, this didn't really have a conclusion. It was a moment in time, or an overheard conversation, in a world we're told nothing about.
Click - 4/5
Interesting concept, somewhat confusing.
Nice imagery and something of an "aha" moment.
Plays on repetition and confusion well, but not sure how it all comes together.
The Blood Drip - 3/5
Nice full-circle with the first story in the collection, but had very much given up on caring about anything by this point in the collection. Only a 12 page story, but so tempting to give call it quits on the book by this point.
May 2, 2020
Som v dome, v ktorom som prežila detstvo a mladosť a tiež každé Vianoce som tu prežila a niekoľko prvých lások a poznám tu každý kút a každý fľak na stene a s kostlivcami v skriniach si tykám a tiež tu poznám každý jeden schod, ktorých je tu 14 ako je 14 zastavení krížovej cesty alebo je ich 14 pretože hádajte, čo dostanete, keď 14 vynásobíte biblickým číslom 3, áno presne tak, 42 a každý z tých schodov je inak veľký a každý je inak krivý, lebo dom si ešte za komouša svojpomocne postavili moji starí rodičia a vzhľadom na to, že moja izba sa nachádza hore a kuchyňa je dole, zakaždým keď som sa v mladosti potrebovala pozrieť do chladničky, musela som cez ne prejsť, takže počas všeliakých deadlinov a skúškových období som tam takto denne otočila aj mount everest a každý z tých 14 schodov sa vpečatil domojich stehien a do mojich bokov a preto si tam na tom schodisku v noci nikdy nezažínam svetlo, načo aj, keď každé myelínové vlákno v mojom zadku pozná ich súradnice. Teda až do včera, včera sa všetky moje istoty zrútili a realita sa otriasla a ja už nikdy nebudem ako predtým, lebo včera, idúc sa okolo druhej ráno pozrieť, čo je nového v chladničke, jeden z tých schodov tam nebol, teda bol, ale asi o pol centimetra nižšie ako by mal byť a vy si poviete, no bože päť milimetrov, čo je na tom, lenže to bolo päť milimetrov vzduchoprázdna. Päť milimetrov ničoty. Päť milimetrov voľného pádu uprostred noci na tmavom schodisku v dome, ktorý môže ale nemusí byť ten, v ktorom ste vyrastali. A Evensonove poviedky sú presne takéto. Päťmilimetrové.
February 6, 2016
Reread October 2022, first time reviewed
.............
"There is not a more intense, prolific, or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson” --George Saunders
High praise indeed!
And here’s what the (somewhat less-well known) scribbler of words, Ray Nessly, had to say (borrowed from a prior review of mine, of another Evenson collection):
Evenson’s work oozes with black humor and intelligence, and reveals his ability to troll the murky depths of humanity for stories that at times recall masters of horror such as Poe.
Okay, this is clunky to get out, but I think the context is (somewhat) important: I’ve read six of Evenson’s books: two novels and four story collections. (Five got 5 stars; the other, the most recent read, got 3.5 stars.)
Collapse of Horses is the first one I’ve reread. I previously read it in 2016; no review. Gave it five stars. This time around though? I honestly think it’s closer to a four, which is still very good.
My highest praise goes to the title story and ‘Bearheart™’. Both stories are astonishingly good. The latter is (got my blurb hat on …): The Tell-tale Heart meets Chucky (or really any cheesy evil doll movie). The twist at the end is perfect. The title story is existential horror at its best, with some Schrodinger’s cat quantum state mindfuck thrown in to gum up the works. Excerpt:
“I would awaken each day to find the house different from how it had been the day before. A door was in the wrong place, a window had been stretched a few inches longer than it had been when I had gone to bed the night before, the light switch, I was certain, had been forced half an inch to the right. Always just a small thing, almost nothing at all, just enough for me to notice…. (My wife) literally could not see the differences I saw. Just as she could not see that sometimes we had three children and sometimes four… In my mind I kept seeing the collapsed horses, and I felt my thoughts again churn over their state. Were they alive or were they dead? … I slipped back into the house—which, like the horse, seemed in a sort of suspended state.”
Nearly as great as these two were:
‘Black Bark’, which has the feel of one of those Twilight Zone westerns, which proved that even cowboys in the days of olde sometimes rode in a very strange world. “Every time you think you have the world figured, trust me, that’s just when the world’s got you figured and is about to spring and break your back.”
And ‘The Punish.’ Beware folks who say things like, “Come on. What possible harm could there be?”
And ‘Any Corpse.’ It opens with the dandily ominous, “When she awoke, a shower of raw flesh had fallen in the field.” Yuck. But(!) before long the black humor emerges, as two unfortunate folks discover if you say to the Furnishers, “It doesn’t matter what corpse. Any corpse. As long as it’s freshly dead,” let it be known that these dudes are totally into being literal about stuff like that.
The remaining stories were solid with a few exceptions. ‘Scour’ seemed to suddenly end in a way I didn’t quite get. For me, ‘Three Indignities’ didn’t work as a three page story. I’m a huge fan of flash fiction, but in this case too much seems packed into the petite package.
Lastly, not all will agree with me on this point, (Evenson’s editors among them) but in a few stories there was an excess of “had.” All of these stories are in past tense, so when a flashback occurs or otherwise there are references to prior events, “proper” English dictates the use of “had.” Yes, but this is not always desirable in fiction. In one short paragraph, there are eight instances of “had”, eight in four lines, one before every verb. (There's a milder example of it in the excerpt from the title story). When overdone, it is clunky sounding, is hard to ignore, and is a constant reminder that we are being told rather shown. One or two is sufficient to provide a shift in time. Okay, far be it from me to question a fantastic writer such as Brian Evenson. But this is something that gets in the way of my reading experience, and I’m not alone.
Starting around 1995 to 2000 or so, I’ve read a number of self-editing books that allude to this, and unfortunately I notice it when it occurs, and it bugs me because it’s unnecessary and avoidable.
“And Sol Stein has this to say in Stein on Writing:
Certain words should carry warning labels for the writer. “Had” is the number-one villain. It spoils more flashbacks than any other word. Most fiction is written in the straight past tense. When writing flashbacks, as quickly as possible use the same tense you’re using for the present scenes.”
Haditis. Give generously. We shall find a cure.
https://www.garrettboatmanauthor.com/...
I don’t like to exit on this note, so let me repeat:
“There is not a more intense, prolific, or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson” --George Saunders
Evenson’s work oozes with black humor and intelligence, and reveals his ability to troll the murky depths of humanity for stories that at times recall masters of horror such as Poe.
--Me
.............
"There is not a more intense, prolific, or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson” --George Saunders
High praise indeed!
And here’s what the (somewhat less-well known) scribbler of words, Ray Nessly, had to say (borrowed from a prior review of mine, of another Evenson collection):
Evenson’s work oozes with black humor and intelligence, and reveals his ability to troll the murky depths of humanity for stories that at times recall masters of horror such as Poe.
Okay, this is clunky to get out, but I think the context is (somewhat) important: I’ve read six of Evenson’s books: two novels and four story collections. (Five got 5 stars; the other, the most recent read, got 3.5 stars.)
Collapse of Horses is the first one I’ve reread. I previously read it in 2016; no review. Gave it five stars. This time around though? I honestly think it’s closer to a four, which is still very good.
My highest praise goes to the title story and ‘Bearheart™’. Both stories are astonishingly good. The latter is (got my blurb hat on …): The Tell-tale Heart meets Chucky (or really any cheesy evil doll movie). The twist at the end is perfect. The title story is existential horror at its best, with some Schrodinger’s cat quantum state mindfuck thrown in to gum up the works. Excerpt:
“I would awaken each day to find the house different from how it had been the day before. A door was in the wrong place, a window had been stretched a few inches longer than it had been when I had gone to bed the night before, the light switch, I was certain, had been forced half an inch to the right. Always just a small thing, almost nothing at all, just enough for me to notice…. (My wife) literally could not see the differences I saw. Just as she could not see that sometimes we had three children and sometimes four… In my mind I kept seeing the collapsed horses, and I felt my thoughts again churn over their state. Were they alive or were they dead? … I slipped back into the house—which, like the horse, seemed in a sort of suspended state.”
Nearly as great as these two were:
‘Black Bark’, which has the feel of one of those Twilight Zone westerns, which proved that even cowboys in the days of olde sometimes rode in a very strange world. “Every time you think you have the world figured, trust me, that’s just when the world’s got you figured and is about to spring and break your back.”
And ‘The Punish.’ Beware folks who say things like, “Come on. What possible harm could there be?”
And ‘Any Corpse.’ It opens with the dandily ominous, “When she awoke, a shower of raw flesh had fallen in the field.” Yuck. But(!) before long the black humor emerges, as two unfortunate folks discover if you say to the Furnishers, “It doesn’t matter what corpse. Any corpse. As long as it’s freshly dead,” let it be known that these dudes are totally into being literal about stuff like that.
The remaining stories were solid with a few exceptions. ‘Scour’ seemed to suddenly end in a way I didn’t quite get. For me, ‘Three Indignities’ didn’t work as a three page story. I’m a huge fan of flash fiction, but in this case too much seems packed into the petite package.
Lastly, not all will agree with me on this point, (Evenson’s editors among them) but in a few stories there was an excess of “had.” All of these stories are in past tense, so when a flashback occurs or otherwise there are references to prior events, “proper” English dictates the use of “had.” Yes, but this is not always desirable in fiction. In one short paragraph, there are eight instances of “had”, eight in four lines, one before every verb. (There's a milder example of it in the excerpt from the title story). When overdone, it is clunky sounding, is hard to ignore, and is a constant reminder that we are being told rather shown. One or two is sufficient to provide a shift in time. Okay, far be it from me to question a fantastic writer such as Brian Evenson. But this is something that gets in the way of my reading experience, and I’m not alone.
Starting around 1995 to 2000 or so, I’ve read a number of self-editing books that allude to this, and unfortunately I notice it when it occurs, and it bugs me because it’s unnecessary and avoidable.
“And Sol Stein has this to say in Stein on Writing:
Certain words should carry warning labels for the writer. “Had” is the number-one villain. It spoils more flashbacks than any other word. Most fiction is written in the straight past tense. When writing flashbacks, as quickly as possible use the same tense you’re using for the present scenes.”
Haditis. Give generously. We shall find a cure.
https://www.garrettboatmanauthor.com/...
I don’t like to exit on this note, so let me repeat:
“There is not a more intense, prolific, or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson” --George Saunders
Evenson’s work oozes with black humor and intelligence, and reveals his ability to troll the murky depths of humanity for stories that at times recall masters of horror such as Poe.
--Me
November 26, 2020
3.5 stars rounded up because it’s Evenson (especially for the way he slyly connects the first and last stories) and despite there being a smaller proportion of really good stories in this collection than in some of his other books, it still has enough good ones spaced out to provide a solid foundation. Also, it’s always hard for me to tell with Evenson when a story is just ‘average’ because the bar is set so high for his best stories that the average ones seem to be of much lesser quality than I suspect they actually are. Whenever I’m reading these so-called average stories, though, I’m often thinking about characteristics of his best stories and wishing those characteristics were present, which does usually dampen the reading experience to a certain extent. At any rate, here is the brief run-down (with stars for favorites):
Black Bark: Classic Evensonian ‘western’ tale rooted in existential cowboy dread.*
A Report: Failed report leads to encoded prison cell confusion.
The Punish: Childhood game redux fails to follow through in an interesting way.
A Collapse of Horses: Haunted house/mind story, a la Evenson.
Three Indignities: Brief slice of body horror.
Cult: Intriguing start but devolves into traumatic relationship tale that fails to delivers much of interest.
Seaside Town: Fairly awful story from an anthology celebrating the fiction of Robert Aickman. The idea of a collection of stories written by writers deliberately attempting to emulate Aickman’s inimitable style repels me. Nevertheless, pastiche has a long tradition in weird fiction, for whatever reason.
The Dust: Science fiction mystery story involving an excruciating process of elimination. Longest piece in the collection.
BearHeart™: Contemporary riff on Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ with a trademark Evensonian ending.
Scour: Skeletal post-apocalyptic meditation. Most notable, perhaps, for its female protagonist—a relative rarity in Evenson’s fiction.
Torpor: Domestic disquietude over loss of spousal limb.
Past Reno: Son makes long drive to(ward) Utah to claim inheritance he’s not sure he wants. Opening paragraph is vintage Evenson. Maintains tension well throughout. A fine story.*
Any Corpse: Nice little reanimation tale featuring androids more clever than they look (and sound). Gross, but also rather funny.*
The Moans: Acid trip...or perhaps something more...*
Click: Man hospitalized with head wound and spotty memory grapples with what is real and what is not.
The Blood Drip: A dead man does tell a tale.*
Recurring images/themes/forms: dust/sand/ashes; individuals locked/trapped in an unpleasant place with no idea of where they are or how and why they came to be there; proto-stories (i.e., narrative pretty much nil with mostly interior monologue driving the pace).
Black Bark: Classic Evensonian ‘western’ tale rooted in existential cowboy dread.*
A Report: Failed report leads to encoded prison cell confusion.
The Punish: Childhood game redux fails to follow through in an interesting way.
A Collapse of Horses: Haunted house/mind story, a la Evenson.
Three Indignities: Brief slice of body horror.
Cult: Intriguing start but devolves into traumatic relationship tale that fails to delivers much of interest.
Seaside Town: Fairly awful story from an anthology celebrating the fiction of Robert Aickman. The idea of a collection of stories written by writers deliberately attempting to emulate Aickman’s inimitable style repels me. Nevertheless, pastiche has a long tradition in weird fiction, for whatever reason.
The Dust: Science fiction mystery story involving an excruciating process of elimination. Longest piece in the collection.
BearHeart™: Contemporary riff on Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ with a trademark Evensonian ending.
Scour: Skeletal post-apocalyptic meditation. Most notable, perhaps, for its female protagonist—a relative rarity in Evenson’s fiction.
Torpor: Domestic disquietude over loss of spousal limb.
Past Reno: Son makes long drive to(ward) Utah to claim inheritance he’s not sure he wants. Opening paragraph is vintage Evenson. Maintains tension well throughout. A fine story.*
Any Corpse: Nice little reanimation tale featuring androids more clever than they look (and sound). Gross, but also rather funny.*
The Moans: Acid trip...or perhaps something more...*
Yes, that was all he needed, some time to himself. He’d just imagined everything, nothing was really happening, he was just fine. He picked up a book, began to flip through it.The Window: Brief episode with an intruder of sorts.
For a moment the letters had a startling crispness and clarity; then they began to pulse slightly.When I have killed, he read, I make a pile of stones, a cairn, and I set in my memory who it was, what it was died there and how. My mind is shaped like a map of these cairns.
Excuse me? he thought. What book was this? He tried to turn it over to look at the title, but no matter how he turned the book he couldn’t see the cover. And when he turned the page of the book, it was still the same page and the same words, and somehow he knew they were words of a book that hadn’t been written yet, that what he was reading wasn’t a book, or not yet a book, but that he’d plucked something out of a web of a future time without getting entangled himself, like a ghost might.
Click: Man hospitalized with head wound and spotty memory grapples with what is real and what is not.
The Blood Drip: A dead man does tell a tale.*
Recurring images/themes/forms: dust/sand/ashes; individuals locked/trapped in an unpleasant place with no idea of where they are or how and why they came to be there; proto-stories (i.e., narrative pretty much nil with mostly interior monologue driving the pace).
March 3, 2016
I once went to Powell's in Portland with the purpose of bringing home several Brian Evenson books. I had gone to reading he had done at Powells a few weeks earlier and didn't have money that night. I went to the horror section and couldn't find it. He had done a reading there the week before, you think they would have it. So I looked him up on the catalog. Literature. I'll be damned. I mean anyone reading my blog knows that I feel the genre ghetto is really a false wall, but I was surprised by this. Six or so years later and four Evenson books under my belt, including a super cool and underrated Alien tie-in written under a thinnly veiled pen name I get it.
Brian Evenson is that good of a writer. He deserves to be in both sections of the book store really. I have been on record about Evenson before.
In 2013 I reviewed his novel Immobility and said: "This is a strange and unsettling novel, that is so powerfully written it has a spooky feeling throughout. It is all done with a subtle tone, and no wasted words. Evenson is not so in love with his words and never overwrites, he writes with a tight control rarely seen in genre work that is also considered “high lit.” It doesn’t remind me of any other book immediately but if pressed to make a comparison I would have to say a cross between Cormac McCarthy’s The Road with a little bit of a THX 1138." I consider this novel to be one of my top five Apocalypse novels.
in 2009 I reviewed his novel Last Days: "It's a brutal horror bizarro detective story. Evenson's dialogue in this book is a perfect choppy noir with lots of short snappy comical exchanges. The suspense is handled with a minimalist flair and the moments of gruesome reveal are plentiful. This is strange and wonderful piece of horror literature that should not be missed."
This year we got another collection of short fiction with the release of A Collapse of Horses. I normally read collections by bouncing around and reading the titles that most interest me. Since I had put so much work in the order of my collection that came out last year I decided to respect that and read front to back.
As a whole the collection contains 17 tales that are all well written and wickedly smart. They range from straight-up horror to surrealist bizarro with many stories that cross many genres. I felt like the collection got darker as it went along and some of the stories towards the end felt more traditionally horror. Evenson doesn't tell simple stories he forces you to think and consider what is happening and it is rarely surface level.
Several stories stood out for me. "The Punish" was a piece that showed off Evenson's skills at creating characters who despite being odd feel real. A story like "Bearheart" that first appeared in Dark Discoveries magazine felt like a 80's Twilight zone episode. (I really liked the 80's run of the TZ). This story had a simple yet heartbreaking concept at the core. "Scour" packed more apocalyptic gritty feelings and sensations into single paragraphs than many end of the world novels. "Past Reno" was a cool story that plays with a figure 8 narrative structure to excellent effect. "Click" has a Phillip K. Dick what is reality vibe going on without a hint of Science Fiction.
However my favorite story in the book is a short one called "Any Corpse." It opens with "When she awoke, a shower of flesh had fallen in the field." This might be the most grim story I have every read. A surreal horror story about a cannibal trade in what appears to be after the fall of society. This story is bonkers, disturbing and beautifully composed. Worth buying this book for.
Another example of a master at work. If you like weird fiction on the darker side of high lit, you can't miss this one.
Brian Evenson is that good of a writer. He deserves to be in both sections of the book store really. I have been on record about Evenson before.
In 2013 I reviewed his novel Immobility and said: "This is a strange and unsettling novel, that is so powerfully written it has a spooky feeling throughout. It is all done with a subtle tone, and no wasted words. Evenson is not so in love with his words and never overwrites, he writes with a tight control rarely seen in genre work that is also considered “high lit.” It doesn’t remind me of any other book immediately but if pressed to make a comparison I would have to say a cross between Cormac McCarthy’s The Road with a little bit of a THX 1138." I consider this novel to be one of my top five Apocalypse novels.
in 2009 I reviewed his novel Last Days: "It's a brutal horror bizarro detective story. Evenson's dialogue in this book is a perfect choppy noir with lots of short snappy comical exchanges. The suspense is handled with a minimalist flair and the moments of gruesome reveal are plentiful. This is strange and wonderful piece of horror literature that should not be missed."
This year we got another collection of short fiction with the release of A Collapse of Horses. I normally read collections by bouncing around and reading the titles that most interest me. Since I had put so much work in the order of my collection that came out last year I decided to respect that and read front to back.
As a whole the collection contains 17 tales that are all well written and wickedly smart. They range from straight-up horror to surrealist bizarro with many stories that cross many genres. I felt like the collection got darker as it went along and some of the stories towards the end felt more traditionally horror. Evenson doesn't tell simple stories he forces you to think and consider what is happening and it is rarely surface level.
Several stories stood out for me. "The Punish" was a piece that showed off Evenson's skills at creating characters who despite being odd feel real. A story like "Bearheart" that first appeared in Dark Discoveries magazine felt like a 80's Twilight zone episode. (I really liked the 80's run of the TZ). This story had a simple yet heartbreaking concept at the core. "Scour" packed more apocalyptic gritty feelings and sensations into single paragraphs than many end of the world novels. "Past Reno" was a cool story that plays with a figure 8 narrative structure to excellent effect. "Click" has a Phillip K. Dick what is reality vibe going on without a hint of Science Fiction.
However my favorite story in the book is a short one called "Any Corpse." It opens with "When she awoke, a shower of flesh had fallen in the field." This might be the most grim story I have every read. A surreal horror story about a cannibal trade in what appears to be after the fall of society. This story is bonkers, disturbing and beautifully composed. Worth buying this book for.
Another example of a master at work. If you like weird fiction on the darker side of high lit, you can't miss this one.
April 19, 2021
After I open the book I just need to accept that I'm in Brian Evenson's world now and he will not be held accountable for changing the rules in whatever way he likes--the rules of storytelling, the rules of physics, the rules of decorum. In Brian Evenson's fictional world I'm always crawling helplessly along the liminal border between the realistic and the terrifying. You might even say that I'm a snail, crawling along the edge of a straight razor. This is my dream; this is my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor, and surviving.
February 11, 2016
I don’t read short stories as often as novels, and I don’t really know how reviewers typically go about analyzing them. But I do remember an assignment in a personality psych class for which we (the students) each had to choose ten pictures (from magazines, newspapers, etc.) ‘at random’, and write a very brief story about each one. After we’d done this, we were to read over the stories and decide if there were any common themes or ideas that we hadn't been aware of while writing. Sure enough there were, at least in my case.
A Collapse of Horses reminded of this assignment, probably because the commonalities among these stories seemed especially clear to me. I would say that the majority of them are about the loss of the self. That may sound like an overused phrase, and/or unhelpfully vague, but these stories are quite visceral and specific; the agent of this loss can be a sexual partner, a drug’s long-term effects, an amputation, torture, the seemingly boundless space of the western US, a head trauma, oxygen deprivation…or a stranger who steps out from the shadows and touches you, and after a few moments of darkness you realize that you are now him, he is you, and he’s walking off with your body to live your life (there’s a Cortazar story like this, too, called ‘The Distances’- actually, I think there are a number of stories like this).
Of course, that last one can’t happen. At least I don’t think it can. But there must be a reason I found the story, and many of the others, unsettling. I think they evoke the following anxiety: the self, if there is such a thing, can’t remain ‘pure’- not even if you do your best to never leave your room or interact with others. Change is inevitable, and often out of your control. And while most of us want to experience, grow and change, there’s always a risk; what you do in order to change, or what is done to you, could kill you, or damage you in some irreparable way. But I’m digressing; these stories are not really about people forcing themselves to take risks, but rather about frightened people who do their best to avoid the things they’re frightened of…but are confronted by them anyway, the same way that we, no matter how we sublimate or distract ourselves, will eventually be confronted by death.
I didn’t care much for these stories at first. It probably didn’t help that I wanted to avoid being in agreement with George “wannabe David Foster Wallace” Saunders, who has a blurb on the back. Additionally, two of the first four or five stories lacked proper nouns; the first of these two, “A Report”, is narrated by a nameless man sitting in a prison cell. At first, he believes that it's his calling out that causes the guards to come down the hall, open the cell next to his, and burn the soles of the feet of that cell’s prisoner. But perhaps the burnings happen at random; or perhaps there is no torture taking place, no other prisoner, no guards, it’s all just a recording. Then there is a tapping that comes from one of the cells next to his. Thinking that it may be a code, he imitates the pattern on the opposite side of his cell with one of the arms of his glasses, hoping to pass the message along. But what does the message mean? Was it a message at all? Did he even really hear anything? The story ends, of course, without the nameless man discovering the answers to any of his questions. If we take the story as a metaphor, it seems to be saying that not only is true communication impossible, but we do not know that there is anyone else there at all. All we can do is listen to the screams of agony of those unluckier than us (if screams of agony are truly what they are, and if others really do exist), and think, ‘thank God it passed me by…this time.’ It’s horrific, like almost all of the stories here, but seemed to me too much like philosophy masquerading as fiction. The fifth story, “Three Indignities”, is equally uplifting; it’s three pages long, and about a man who has one operation to remove an ear, and a few months later, due to the spread of cancer, another to remove his penis. The point seems to be that it is possible that you can be altered in traumatizing ways, so much so that you do not recognize your ‘self’. But I guess my problem with the story is that a) it’s a fairly obvious point, b) I didn’t find anything pleasurable about it, and c) I hate to admit this, but it made me uncomfortable- more uncomfortable than I wanted to be. I admit that’s a weak criticism, but there it is- I just didn't like it.
After “Three Indignities”, I started flipping through the book and reading the stories out of order. For some reason, and perhaps aided by some personal resonances, this did the trick. “Cult” has something distinctive and eerie about it that’s hard to put into words; the reader may assume (especially given that Evenson is an ex-Mormon, which is almost the only thing I know about him as a person) that the agent of the loss of self in this story would turn out to be a dehumanizing group or cult that crushes the identity of the individual, but the story very cleverly subverts that expectation; I happened to read “Past Reno” only a few days after being hypnotized by a Youtube video a guy recorded while driving along U.S. Route 50 in Nevada, known as “the loneliest road in America” (first dubbed pejoratively by Life magazine, and then adopted by the locals as a marketing tool), and it’s not hard to understand how you could start to imagine you weren’t actually making any progress; “Dust”, the longest story, about a group of miners on a foreign planet with a diminishing supply of oxygen, is fun, and could make a great horror movie along the lines of The Thing; and then “The Window”, which starts out like something that happened to me a few months ago (someone knocked violently at my bedroom window in the middle of the night, an incident that still hasn’t been explained satisfactorily), and which for a few breathless moments I thought was going to go on to describe exactly what had happened to me. I’m not sure what that would have meant, but surely nothing good.
Evenson is the third Mountain Standard Time writer I've read since January, along with Mark Jabbour and Hunter S. Thompson. In the intensity of the darkness of his view of life, Evenson reminds me of Paul Bowles, and of Bowles's The Delicate Prey, which has some fantastic stories. If these collections were albums, they would both be extremely abrasive: doom metal or noise music, the kind of music that makes you feel like you're in hell.
February 3, 2026
Evenson is one of the few genuinely creepy authors still writing. When run-of-the-mill horror stories simply rely on blood and guts and killer clowns, we are likely to grow bored with the brainlessness of contemporary horror offerings. That is when you should read Brian Evenson to freshen your hope in the genre's potential. His brand of horror is brother to confusion.
The stories in this collection rely heavily on dialogue. That is where their driving force can often be pinpointed. Some of his dialogue reads like Beckett. For instance. "What are you doing in that tree?" asks one character. "What tree?" comes the reply.
Characters are often not perceiving the same reality. It dawns on the reader that something about the reality being described is off, but we would be hard-pressed to say what is wrong about it.
Mysteries underlie the often open-ended scenarios depicted. Don't come to this collection seeking closure.
A narrator lies in a cell, alone. They hear screams. The man in the cell next to them is being tortured. Much time passes. Guards torture other prisoners seemingly at random. There is no rhyme or reason for the torture. It simply happens. It must be tolerated.
Horror surrounds us. But we can choose to ignore it. We can become inured to it. It ceases to be horror when it becomes mundane. Yet there is a sudden realization sometimes that might strike us that mundane things contain a secret layer of horror.
Evenson stories teach us to see the horror in crevices we are not likely to peer into.
Come for precise storytelling.
One man tells the story of a slab of black bark which always reappears in a jacket pocket. The horror in the story depends on what goes unexplained. The fact that most of the universe remains unexplained, and in the end must be unexplainable is an abstract horror which will dawn on the reader repeatedly while reading this collection if they are paying attention.
One of the great things about this author is how much he's written. You are unlikely to run out of reading material soon. His brand is not so much a brand as a species of horror.
His style is straightforward, but not overly detailed. He favors minimalism - a concept Thomas Ligotti might've benefitted from employing.
One lesson to draw from his work seems to be the unsettling fact that you will never grok another person. They might at any time act in such a way as to defy reason. They are separate entities from you. You cannot know how they will react. What's to stop anyone, at any time, from doing something completely unexplainable?
A great mix and a great intro to his perturbing world. Looking forward to my next foray.
The stories in this collection rely heavily on dialogue. That is where their driving force can often be pinpointed. Some of his dialogue reads like Beckett. For instance. "What are you doing in that tree?" asks one character. "What tree?" comes the reply.
Characters are often not perceiving the same reality. It dawns on the reader that something about the reality being described is off, but we would be hard-pressed to say what is wrong about it.
Mysteries underlie the often open-ended scenarios depicted. Don't come to this collection seeking closure.
A narrator lies in a cell, alone. They hear screams. The man in the cell next to them is being tortured. Much time passes. Guards torture other prisoners seemingly at random. There is no rhyme or reason for the torture. It simply happens. It must be tolerated.
Horror surrounds us. But we can choose to ignore it. We can become inured to it. It ceases to be horror when it becomes mundane. Yet there is a sudden realization sometimes that might strike us that mundane things contain a secret layer of horror.
Evenson stories teach us to see the horror in crevices we are not likely to peer into.
Come for precise storytelling.
One man tells the story of a slab of black bark which always reappears in a jacket pocket. The horror in the story depends on what goes unexplained. The fact that most of the universe remains unexplained, and in the end must be unexplainable is an abstract horror which will dawn on the reader repeatedly while reading this collection if they are paying attention.
One of the great things about this author is how much he's written. You are unlikely to run out of reading material soon. His brand is not so much a brand as a species of horror.
His style is straightforward, but not overly detailed. He favors minimalism - a concept Thomas Ligotti might've benefitted from employing.
One lesson to draw from his work seems to be the unsettling fact that you will never grok another person. They might at any time act in such a way as to defy reason. They are separate entities from you. You cannot know how they will react. What's to stop anyone, at any time, from doing something completely unexplainable?
A great mix and a great intro to his perturbing world. Looking forward to my next foray.
February 26, 2016
I’ve been a Brian Evenson fan for almost eight years now and I’m happy to say this fact has improved my life. It can improve your life as well with the small investment that is A Collapse of Horses, Evenson’s latest story collection. On the surface it’s much the same as his other short story collections. People variously label this work as horror, or literary fiction, or literary horror (and the publishers include a quirky page after the final story that says “LITERATURE is not the same thing as PUBLISHING”, which comes off as odd in a collection such as this). To be sure, there is horror here—the literary effect. But there is also something else going on that perhaps people are mistaking for horror, and that’s cognitive dissonance. That’s one of Evenson’s true strengths and it shines in stories like “Click,” my personal favorite in the collection, a tale of a recovering (or dying) man who cannot keep his environment straight. He has either been accused of a horrible crime or he has not. He’s either being visited by police and his lawyer or he’s not. What makes Evenson among the greats of this technique is that the success of the story does not rely on the resolution of the “is he or isn’t he” question, but in the ability to make the story work without conscious resolution. And this, my friends, is why I’ve been consistently recommending Evenson’s works to fans of Bizarro fiction. His writing is weird. Not capital W weird, at least not always. He’s doing weird things above and beyond literary horror. He’s doing things that are sometimes weirder than self-described Bizarros.
As a whole, A Collapse of Horses is definitely a good introduction to Evenson’s short fiction. It contains a number of very accessible stories. “BearHeart™” begins as a cute, quirky relationship story and gradually devolves into psychosis. “Torpor,” another relationship story, revolves around the physical pains of a woman whose significant other loses an arm. “Cult” examines the mind of man who is contemplating joining a cult to escape an unhealthy relationship. In fact, there really are more relationship stories in this collection than horror stories. Sure, some of them involve horrific elements, but they really focus on loss, sadness, and alienation. There’s no real name for this genre, so let’s call it Sadcore and black our eyes.
If I’m not mistaken, this collection includes the first Evenson short that is stated to be set on an alien world—“The Dust,” a story of a failed mining expedition awaiting rescue when the crew begins to be murdered brutally, one by one. This one is a horror story, though the space setting probably has people calling it science-fiction because people always love to recategorize things into whatever niche they enjoy. I just call it awesome because I speak plainly.
There’s madness in many of these stories and Evenson has a great grasp of how to play with it. “A Collapse of Horses,” the title track, examines both dementia and obsession in a manner that is loosely reminiscent of his earlier stories “The Polygamy of Language” and “The Wavering Knife” but far more personal. After a head trauma, a man is convinced that some days he has three children, other days four, and this number can only be established by counting beds. The uncertainty, the disconnection from reality, of a man who has three children one day and four the next, is a complicated kind of terror that most writers have a hard time getting to the heart of, but this is a feeling he has been able to produce in me many, many times throughout his oeuvre. The titular story is great example of his masterful craft, but it is not even as powerful as some of his prior excursions into this territory.
I could probably obsess over the nuances of this collection for several thousand words, but I’m not sure that would be good for my soul right now. Instead I’ll just move on to the highlights: the wrap-arounders, the first and last stories, “Black Bark” and “The Blood Drip.”
“Black Bark” is a story I recognized. It took a shape very similar to that of “The Second Boy,” which appeared in Evenson’s previous collection, Windeye. This is a story of two men escaping into the wilderness, one injured, who have to make camp in a less than ideal locale. The injured man tells an esoteric story that troubles the other man. Upon awaking the next morning, the injured man is nowhere to be found. The other searches for the man and for salvation, but unable to find either, retires to the same campsite where the other man shows up unexpectedly and menacingly repeats the story he told earlier while the other man is powerless to do anything about it. This is a description that could be applied to either of the stories I just mentioned. The similarities struck me and I wondered if this could be accidental. It seemed impossible. And while the stories have many similarities, they are both excellent and worth a read, so there was no complaint that “Evenson is repeating himself” in my mind. It’s like when Chuck Berry or The Ramones re-wrote one of their own hits. Still an enjoyable treat.
But when I reached the end of the collection, I started to see yet another story that followed this very similar pattern. And in “The Blood Drip” the campfire story told is loosely “Black Bark.” That’s some pleasingly meta stuff right there. It works so well it made me smile despite the bleak nature of the story. So there’s a really sophisticated commentary going on here, and an exploration of how to achieve similar literary effects with different stories. Evenson is creating his own tropes to play with and it couldn’t be more awesome (that’s the clickbait title for this review, by the way). He’s reinvented the ghost story (that’s the tagline).
Definitely a solid four star collection with enough 5 star stories to cause me to recommend it to everyone I know. Are you someone I know? Then you should read this, pronto. Then pick up The Wavering Knife and/or Last Days. Your life will become measurably better.
As a whole, A Collapse of Horses is definitely a good introduction to Evenson’s short fiction. It contains a number of very accessible stories. “BearHeart™” begins as a cute, quirky relationship story and gradually devolves into psychosis. “Torpor,” another relationship story, revolves around the physical pains of a woman whose significant other loses an arm. “Cult” examines the mind of man who is contemplating joining a cult to escape an unhealthy relationship. In fact, there really are more relationship stories in this collection than horror stories. Sure, some of them involve horrific elements, but they really focus on loss, sadness, and alienation. There’s no real name for this genre, so let’s call it Sadcore and black our eyes.
If I’m not mistaken, this collection includes the first Evenson short that is stated to be set on an alien world—“The Dust,” a story of a failed mining expedition awaiting rescue when the crew begins to be murdered brutally, one by one. This one is a horror story, though the space setting probably has people calling it science-fiction because people always love to recategorize things into whatever niche they enjoy. I just call it awesome because I speak plainly.
There’s madness in many of these stories and Evenson has a great grasp of how to play with it. “A Collapse of Horses,” the title track, examines both dementia and obsession in a manner that is loosely reminiscent of his earlier stories “The Polygamy of Language” and “The Wavering Knife” but far more personal. After a head trauma, a man is convinced that some days he has three children, other days four, and this number can only be established by counting beds. The uncertainty, the disconnection from reality, of a man who has three children one day and four the next, is a complicated kind of terror that most writers have a hard time getting to the heart of, but this is a feeling he has been able to produce in me many, many times throughout his oeuvre. The titular story is great example of his masterful craft, but it is not even as powerful as some of his prior excursions into this territory.
I could probably obsess over the nuances of this collection for several thousand words, but I’m not sure that would be good for my soul right now. Instead I’ll just move on to the highlights: the wrap-arounders, the first and last stories, “Black Bark” and “The Blood Drip.”
“Black Bark” is a story I recognized. It took a shape very similar to that of “The Second Boy,” which appeared in Evenson’s previous collection, Windeye. This is a story of two men escaping into the wilderness, one injured, who have to make camp in a less than ideal locale. The injured man tells an esoteric story that troubles the other man. Upon awaking the next morning, the injured man is nowhere to be found. The other searches for the man and for salvation, but unable to find either, retires to the same campsite where the other man shows up unexpectedly and menacingly repeats the story he told earlier while the other man is powerless to do anything about it. This is a description that could be applied to either of the stories I just mentioned. The similarities struck me and I wondered if this could be accidental. It seemed impossible. And while the stories have many similarities, they are both excellent and worth a read, so there was no complaint that “Evenson is repeating himself” in my mind. It’s like when Chuck Berry or The Ramones re-wrote one of their own hits. Still an enjoyable treat.
But when I reached the end of the collection, I started to see yet another story that followed this very similar pattern. And in “The Blood Drip” the campfire story told is loosely “Black Bark.” That’s some pleasingly meta stuff right there. It works so well it made me smile despite the bleak nature of the story. So there’s a really sophisticated commentary going on here, and an exploration of how to achieve similar literary effects with different stories. Evenson is creating his own tropes to play with and it couldn’t be more awesome (that’s the clickbait title for this review, by the way). He’s reinvented the ghost story (that’s the tagline).
Definitely a solid four star collection with enough 5 star stories to cause me to recommend it to everyone I know. Are you someone I know? Then you should read this, pronto. Then pick up The Wavering Knife and/or Last Days. Your life will become measurably better.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 13, 2022
Solid collection of eerie, subtle tales with a philosophical bent and a metafictional angle. Evenson's prose is laconic but sharp and the best stories are effective in how fleeting they are, like you're only seeing a snapshot of something that doesn't make sense, a sort of Lovecraftian horror in the usage of literary form and space alone. The best stories here flirt with Kafka though, like the disquieting "A Report" which features a central terror of torment committed by a faceless and unknowable system, or the best story here, "Click", an absolutely dread-inducing story focused on loss of memory and identity coupled with a hearty dose of medical gaslighting and crazymaking from the very people we're told to trust most. Not a whole lot to say about this for me, it's just good!
March 29, 2016
Some people say Evenson is the new Lovecraft, a modern heir to Poe, the best psychological terror writer in decades. Well, I think that even after a full creative writing program at Miskatonic University he would not be allowed to clean the master's boots! This book is a collection of highly irregular short stories, some of them pretty good (e.g "The Dust", "Bear Heart") but the majority is just a series of shallow suspense exercises with reasonable plot ideas but that should be much more worked out to turn themselves into real publishing material.
September 1, 2016
"Black Bark," where have you been all my life?
January 9, 2016
Brian Evenson's astonishing new collection from Coffee House Press, A Collapse of Horses, coincides with the re-release of three previous works: the much heralded novels Father of Lies, Open Curtain and Last Days. Each cover depicts an illustration of part of a creature that when taken together form a beast that doesn't exist.
There's an apt metaphor here, but a misleading one. While these stories have all the earmarks of Evenson's fiction with varying degrees of violence, horror and dread, A Collapse of Horses doesn't complete the picture of Evenson's career so much as spin it in a number of fascinating new directions, each more unsettling than the last.
There are stories of thieves on horseback disappearing into the wilderness and holing up in a cave, off-planet drillers toiling in increasingly toxic working conditions, survivors of an apocalyptic conflict bartering with machines for scraps of meat, but no matter what genre Evenson appears to be working in, the most crucial action takes place between the ears. These stories rely less on lush language and body horror than the annihilating dread of uncertainty.
As the antagonist of "Black Bart" suggests in the opening story, "Every time you think you have the world figured out, trust me, that's just when the world's got you figured out and is about to spring and break your back." The story starts with a lone rider on the trail at dusk but ends up someplace inexplicably weird and utterly unique.
In "Past Reno," a man's attempts to confront his past are stymied by an unsettling memory of his father forcing him to go down into a dark and musty storm cellar filled with strips of drying meat. When his father asks him, "You seen it?" the boy nods, but in truth the boy doesn't know what he's seen or was supposed to have seen or what any of it might mean. The story's power stems not from what might or might not have been lurking in that cellar, living or dead, but the man's inability many years later to put the question to rest. This troubling lack of resolution curdles his imagination and becomes its own dark thing capable of ruining intentions and destroying reason.
The longest story in the collection is "The Dust," in which a crew of workers on a distant planet measures its dwindling resources against a ticking clock. Without giving too much of the plot away, "The Dust" presents the reader with a twist on the classic lifeboat dilemma by pitting the solidarity of the group against the desires of the individual. However, Evenson isn't interested in that kind of dichotomy. By introducing a dash of uncertainty—"And what if the dust wasn't just dust, but something else entirely?"—the story collapses into a paranoid fever dream.
Another example of this deadly uncertainly occurs in "Blood Drip," which closes out the collection and serves as a doppelganger-bookend to "Black Bart." A man alone in the wilderness imagines he hears a spring and becomes thirsty. "But when he tried to look for the stream he could not locate it, and the sound never seemed much closer." Did he hear the sound and in his confusion miss the spring? Or did he imagine the sound and invent the spring? Either way he continues wandering, his thirst very much real.
There's a tendency to view stories that don't resolve with suspicion, as if they were engines with some kind of design flaw. That's not the case here. In A Collapse of Horses, Evenson takes his characters to the point where their uncertainties crystalize into a course of action from which there is no coming back. To see this as a deficiency is like saying that a story of a man who falls off a cliff is cheapened by not reveling in the splat.
Perhaps the most telling tale in the collection is the title story, which begins at the end: "I am certain nobody in my family survived. I am certain they burned, that their faces blackened and bubbled, just as did my own." These opening lines evoke a great many feelings: confusion, horror, pity, disgust, but certainty isn't one of them. A Collapse of Horses explores the horror of living in a world that resists being figured out until it's much too late.
There's an apt metaphor here, but a misleading one. While these stories have all the earmarks of Evenson's fiction with varying degrees of violence, horror and dread, A Collapse of Horses doesn't complete the picture of Evenson's career so much as spin it in a number of fascinating new directions, each more unsettling than the last.
There are stories of thieves on horseback disappearing into the wilderness and holing up in a cave, off-planet drillers toiling in increasingly toxic working conditions, survivors of an apocalyptic conflict bartering with machines for scraps of meat, but no matter what genre Evenson appears to be working in, the most crucial action takes place between the ears. These stories rely less on lush language and body horror than the annihilating dread of uncertainty.
As the antagonist of "Black Bart" suggests in the opening story, "Every time you think you have the world figured out, trust me, that's just when the world's got you figured out and is about to spring and break your back." The story starts with a lone rider on the trail at dusk but ends up someplace inexplicably weird and utterly unique.
In "Past Reno," a man's attempts to confront his past are stymied by an unsettling memory of his father forcing him to go down into a dark and musty storm cellar filled with strips of drying meat. When his father asks him, "You seen it?" the boy nods, but in truth the boy doesn't know what he's seen or was supposed to have seen or what any of it might mean. The story's power stems not from what might or might not have been lurking in that cellar, living or dead, but the man's inability many years later to put the question to rest. This troubling lack of resolution curdles his imagination and becomes its own dark thing capable of ruining intentions and destroying reason.
The longest story in the collection is "The Dust," in which a crew of workers on a distant planet measures its dwindling resources against a ticking clock. Without giving too much of the plot away, "The Dust" presents the reader with a twist on the classic lifeboat dilemma by pitting the solidarity of the group against the desires of the individual. However, Evenson isn't interested in that kind of dichotomy. By introducing a dash of uncertainty—"And what if the dust wasn't just dust, but something else entirely?"—the story collapses into a paranoid fever dream.
Another example of this deadly uncertainly occurs in "Blood Drip," which closes out the collection and serves as a doppelganger-bookend to "Black Bart." A man alone in the wilderness imagines he hears a spring and becomes thirsty. "But when he tried to look for the stream he could not locate it, and the sound never seemed much closer." Did he hear the sound and in his confusion miss the spring? Or did he imagine the sound and invent the spring? Either way he continues wandering, his thirst very much real.
There's a tendency to view stories that don't resolve with suspicion, as if they were engines with some kind of design flaw. That's not the case here. In A Collapse of Horses, Evenson takes his characters to the point where their uncertainties crystalize into a course of action from which there is no coming back. To see this as a deficiency is like saying that a story of a man who falls off a cliff is cheapened by not reveling in the splat.
Perhaps the most telling tale in the collection is the title story, which begins at the end: "I am certain nobody in my family survived. I am certain they burned, that their faces blackened and bubbled, just as did my own." These opening lines evoke a great many feelings: confusion, horror, pity, disgust, but certainty isn't one of them. A Collapse of Horses explores the horror of living in a world that resists being figured out until it's much too late.
February 25, 2016
A quiet, panicked take on horror - Brian Evenson's short stories are filled to the brim with dark water - possibilities spilling out past the corners of the pages. His stories are the kind that produce short-breathed, cosmic questions, and are masterful at provoking anxiety by not answering them. Favorites were 'Black Bark', 'The Dust', "BearHeart(TM)', 'A Collapse of Horses,' and 'The Blood Drip'
October 28, 2017
Solid collection of strange stories, mostly of the quiet but unsettling kind. Ambiguity abounds. There were a couple stories that I didn't get at all, but overall I really enjoyed it.
October 12, 2024
Consistently good short stories that occasionally stick the landing.
March 14, 2022
4 stars--I really liked (?) it.
First of all, the title of this collection is perfect. Not only is it the title of (arguably) the collection's most well-known story, but there are a lot of dead or dying or collapsed horses in these stories!
Evenson's stories are about loneliness, feeling stagnant, feeling out of place or disjointed, being unable to move on, being trapped, feeling despair or disquiet or being otherwise out of sync with other people/reality. They're weird and unsettling. There's an aura of helplessness in all these stories.
Some of my favorites:
Black Bark. Very disquieting.
A Collapse of Horses. A modern classic.
Seaside Town. The end of this is so puzzling, yet so unsettling.
Past Reno. I love the opening sentence of this story: "Bernt began to suspect the trip would turn strange when, on the outskirts of Reno, he entered a convenience store that had one of its six aisles completely dedicated to jerky." It made me smile... but after finishing the story, there's such a sense of unease that even this line becomes ominous.
Any Corpse. How did Everson come up with this? I'm in awe. (Or maybe worried about him.)
The Window. A simple yet disturbing tale.
First of all, the title of this collection is perfect. Not only is it the title of (arguably) the collection's most well-known story, but there are a lot of dead or dying or collapsed horses in these stories!
Evenson's stories are about loneliness, feeling stagnant, feeling out of place or disjointed, being unable to move on, being trapped, feeling despair or disquiet or being otherwise out of sync with other people/reality. They're weird and unsettling. There's an aura of helplessness in all these stories.
Some of my favorites:
Black Bark. Very disquieting.
A Collapse of Horses. A modern classic.
Seaside Town. The end of this is so puzzling, yet so unsettling.
Past Reno. I love the opening sentence of this story: "Bernt began to suspect the trip would turn strange when, on the outskirts of Reno, he entered a convenience store that had one of its six aisles completely dedicated to jerky." It made me smile... but after finishing the story, there's such a sense of unease that even this line becomes ominous.
Any Corpse. How did Everson come up with this? I'm in awe. (Or maybe worried about him.)
The Window. A simple yet disturbing tale.
August 30, 2023
Reading this was like reaching the end of a bout of diarrhea. All you're left with is relief and a pile of poop.
I can see this book being reviewed by the pretentious book clubs with all the cucumber-sandwich sect waxing lyrical about the stories being "atmospheric" or "distilled reality" or "flowing with delicate drama," while they sip their glasses of overpriced Chardonnay. Meanwhile, I'm thinking, "That was a heap of mindless drivel."
I made a brief note about each preceding short story. Here are some of my comments: Black Bark: Couldn't make sense of this one. A Report: Boring, depressing and stupid. The Punish: A revenge story that started out well, then wasn't. A Collapse of Horses: Not bad. A bloke gets a knock on his bonce and hallucinates ... or does he? Three Indignities: Too abstract. Cult: Good story with a bad ending. The Dust: About a bunch of paranoid delusional miners all together on one planet with a paranoid delusional mass killer. Company probably wanted to get rid of them. The dust seemed incidental. Just get a better vacuum cleaner for goodness sake. Scour: Well, that was fucking stupid. Torpor: Just dumb. Any Corpse: Now we're talking. Robots and cannibals together. Pity it was so boring. The Moans: Just dreadful. No idea what was going on. The Window: A ghost story? Really? Click: 35 minutes of my life wasted. The Blood Drip: WTF?
Unfortunately, I have somehow ordered another of Everson's books. I sure hope it's better than this one.
I can see this book being reviewed by the pretentious book clubs with all the cucumber-sandwich sect waxing lyrical about the stories being "atmospheric" or "distilled reality" or "flowing with delicate drama," while they sip their glasses of overpriced Chardonnay. Meanwhile, I'm thinking, "That was a heap of mindless drivel."
I made a brief note about each preceding short story. Here are some of my comments: Black Bark: Couldn't make sense of this one. A Report: Boring, depressing and stupid. The Punish: A revenge story that started out well, then wasn't. A Collapse of Horses: Not bad. A bloke gets a knock on his bonce and hallucinates ... or does he? Three Indignities: Too abstract. Cult: Good story with a bad ending. The Dust: About a bunch of paranoid delusional miners all together on one planet with a paranoid delusional mass killer. Company probably wanted to get rid of them. The dust seemed incidental. Just get a better vacuum cleaner for goodness sake. Scour: Well, that was fucking stupid. Torpor: Just dumb. Any Corpse: Now we're talking. Robots and cannibals together. Pity it was so boring. The Moans: Just dreadful. No idea what was going on. The Window: A ghost story? Really? Click: 35 minutes of my life wasted. The Blood Drip: WTF?
Unfortunately, I have somehow ordered another of Everson's books. I sure hope it's better than this one.
August 15, 2020
Kdybych měla hodnotit celek jako průměr jednotlivých povídek, bylo by to tak na 4*. Ale ta atmosféra mě dostala určitě víc než na 80%.
Nemám obecně moc ráda povídky, jsou na mě krátké, člověk se nestihne začíst a už je konec. Ale tady jsem se stihla ponořit do každé velmi rychle.
Za mě jsou nejzajímavější kousky:
- Méďa Srdcík
- Hlášení - svírá mi útroby i teď
- Jakoukoliv mrtvolu - tento styl, spojení horůrku s určitou vtipnou pointou, mám asi v hororových povídkách nejraději. Tak trochu Halloween - efekt :)
- Prach - tady jsem ocenila sci-fi pozadí, tíživou atmosféru i jasný konec
- Strnulost
- Trestej - možná trochu detektivní styl
- Zhroucení koně
Extra musím vypíchnout skvělý překlad, žádné tiskové nebo jiné chyby. Jednou nebo dvakrát jsem "objevila" překlep a pak jsem zjistila, že jsem špatně četla já.
A potěšily mě takové příjemné detaily, jako např. v obsahu pruhy, které ukazují délku povídky - díky tomu jsem si mohla dávkovat čtení podle toho, kolik jsem měla zrovna času, a taky, že (všimla jsem si asi u osmé povídky) nahoře na stránce maličké čísílko ukazuje, ve které povídce se zrovna nacházím.
Nemám obecně moc ráda povídky, jsou na mě krátké, člověk se nestihne začíst a už je konec. Ale tady jsem se stihla ponořit do každé velmi rychle.
Za mě jsou nejzajímavější kousky:
- Méďa Srdcík
- Hlášení - svírá mi útroby i teď
- Jakoukoliv mrtvolu - tento styl, spojení horůrku s určitou vtipnou pointou, mám asi v hororových povídkách nejraději. Tak trochu Halloween - efekt :)
- Prach - tady jsem ocenila sci-fi pozadí, tíživou atmosféru i jasný konec
- Strnulost
- Trestej - možná trochu detektivní styl
- Zhroucení koně
Extra musím vypíchnout skvělý překlad, žádné tiskové nebo jiné chyby. Jednou nebo dvakrát jsem "objevila" překlep a pak jsem zjistila, že jsem špatně četla já.
A potěšily mě takové příjemné detaily, jako např. v obsahu pruhy, které ukazují délku povídky - díky tomu jsem si mohla dávkovat čtení podle toho, kolik jsem měla zrovna času, a taky, že (všimla jsem si asi u osmé povídky) nahoře na stránce maličké čísílko ukazuje, ve které povídce se zrovna nacházím.
July 3, 2016
Simply one of the best short story collections I've read in a long time. Deeply uncanny. These unlocked places in my mind that have not been traversed before and twisted some well-visited places in such surprising ways. There was not a miss in this collection, and some of them greatly unnerved my sense of comfort. In short, I'll be reading more Evenson. I did not think Logotti had any contenders on my horror short story list. It does now.
P.S. 'The Dust' is worth the price of the book alone.
P.S. 'The Dust' is worth the price of the book alone.
January 6, 2022
A Collapse of Horses attempts a very specific type of horror over and over again, with mixed success. There is a phrase in visual horror "never show the monster", and Evenson has taken that idea to the extreme. Each story is a slow build, where the reader slowly accumulated uncertainty and dread about an amorphous problem that sits just at the periphery of the story. Each time the story gets close, we reach out and grasp for it and find that whatever "it" is slips through our fingers again.
And then, without fail, in every single one of these stories, right as the main conflict is about to occur, the story ends.
It works in maybe three of these stories, and in the rest I am left with a general sense of unease, but not much in the way of emotion otherwise. There's not quite enough meat in most of them to really feel like I got anything out of them. The ones that were good were great, but the rest were underwhelming.
It's infuriating because Click, A Collapse of Horses, and A Report are so good that you want to keep reading, to find the next one that blows you away. But to get there you have to slog through a bunch of nothing. I'm used to this to a certain extent with collections of short stories, but when they're from multiple authors each story feels like you're rolling the dice. Here, you know that Evenson is capable, so each time a story doesn't hit you're disappointed.
About halfway through the book you start to realize that there are a couple of lines here and there that you've seen before. Themes from one story spill very slightly over into the others. At the halfway mark I was actually getting really excited because I suspected that this collection of seemingly random, unordered stories was going to coalesce into a setting-spanning horror, but it never happened. The last story attempts something sort of similar, but other than that there's not really any through-line except the word "horse" showing up in about half the stories.
At the end of the day, read these three stories, and chuck the rest. A Report, A Collapse of Horses, Click
And then, without fail, in every single one of these stories, right as the main conflict is about to occur, the story ends.
It works in maybe three of these stories, and in the rest I am left with a general sense of unease, but not much in the way of emotion otherwise. There's not quite enough meat in most of them to really feel like I got anything out of them. The ones that were good were great, but the rest were underwhelming.
It's infuriating because Click, A Collapse of Horses, and A Report are so good that you want to keep reading, to find the next one that blows you away. But to get there you have to slog through a bunch of nothing. I'm used to this to a certain extent with collections of short stories, but when they're from multiple authors each story feels like you're rolling the dice. Here, you know that Evenson is capable, so each time a story doesn't hit you're disappointed.
About halfway through the book you start to realize that there are a couple of lines here and there that you've seen before. Themes from one story spill very slightly over into the others. At the halfway mark I was actually getting really excited because I suspected that this collection of seemingly random, unordered stories was going to coalesce into a setting-spanning horror, but it never happened. The last story attempts something sort of similar, but other than that there's not really any through-line except the word "horse" showing up in about half the stories.
At the end of the day, read these three stories, and chuck the rest. A Report, A Collapse of Horses, Click
October 23, 2020
Every story reads like a draft. Every story feels like it’s missing it’s third act. None of them are scary, only vaguely “unsettling” and even then only in a prescribed way, as if an algorithm was tasked with coming up with expressing “a palpable sense of unease”. Everything in here is perfunctory and mad libs-y and... just bad. Snore.
May 25, 2022
Reading this book felt like immersing myself in all of my worst nightmares at once, but never wanting to wake up. I'm unable to express how much I love love love this book. It's amazing. Unnerving, odd, speculative, dark, and haunting.
Mr. E is now my favourite author. No time to write anymore, must start reading all of his other works immediately.
Mr. E is now my favourite author. No time to write anymore, must start reading all of his other works immediately.
Read
October 27, 2017‘Evenson’s fiction is stark and often jaw-droppingly funny…Some of the stories here evoke Kafka, some Poe, some Beckett, some Roald Dahl, and one, a demonic teddy-bear chiller called “BearHeart™” even Stephen King, but Evenson’s deadpan style always estranges them a bit from their models: He tells his odd tales oddly, as if his mouth were dry and the words won’t come out right.’
New York Times
‘There is not a more intense, prolific or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson.’
George Saunders
‘Evenson’s fiction is equal parts obsessive, experimental and violent. It can be soul-shaking.’
New Yorker
‘Brian Evenson is one of the treasures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes and Co., but also to Edgar Allan Poe.’
Jonathan Lethem
‘One of the most provocative, inventive and talented writers we have working today.’
Believer
‘Evenson is interested in philosophy and semiotics, the impossibility of ever truly knowing or naming the world, and our fundamental, helpless dependence on what our senses tell us…[His stories] are a wonderful feat of the uncanny.’
Los Angeles Review
‘Violence is punishing but unbelievably subtle in Evenson’s delicate, minimalist stories. And ultimately, there is something cosmic — something utterly Lovecraftian, but without the baroque language — about this type of horror: Beneath the slippery, often abstruse plots lies a vast gulf of nothingness, in the purest and most unsettling sense of the word.’
NPR
‘This new collection, released alongside new editions of three of his older works, offers a great summation of Evenson’s strengths as a writer.’
Vol. 1 Brooklyn
‘A Collapse of Horses is a stunning collection of disparate tales of existential terror, which could serve as a good introduction to readers who are not familiar with his work. However, allow your reviewer to warn you: once you have read Evenson, you will want to read all of Evenson; yet beware, like most addictions, it is a dangerous pursuit and one not easy to pass through unscathed.’
Brooklyn Rail
‘You never realize how deep his fiction has wormed its way into your brain until hours, days, even weeks later, when you’re lying in the dark and Evenson’s images come flooding back, unbidden. A Collapse of Horses will stay with you for a long time…whether you want it to or not.’
Chicago Review of Books
‘Brian Evenson is one of the most consistently vital and unnerving voices in writing today…No matter where you start with Evenson’s work, the door is wide ajar, and once you go through it you won’t be coming out.’
VICE
‘Evenson’s stories, small masterworks of literary horror, are elegantly tense. They operate in psychological territory, never relying on grossness or slasher silliness to convey their scariness…For the Stephen King fan in the house: an author as capable, if a touch less prolific.’
Kirkus
‘A Collapse of Horses is a master class in unnerving storytelling; seventeen short narratives that range from horror to science fiction and from surrealism to noir. The variety is outstanding, the writing is superb, but what makes this collection deserving of attention is how Evenson manages to achieve a perfect balance between what is on the page and what is left out.’
Electric Literature
‘While they run the gamut of genres, these stories all lie in the same orbit of dark gravity: a field of dust, blood, head trauma, inert flesh, semicorporeal stuff and fear– mainly the terror of what we’re capable of.’
Rumpus
‘A collection of 17 powerful and sometimes very weird stories, some of which will send a shiver up the spine of the most well-balanced reader. Brian Evenson has a genuinely original imagination and a strong stomach.’
Sydney Morning Herald
‘A Collapse of Horses is a masterclass of the horror short story…Many of these tales will likely have readers leaving their lights on well after they put the book down.’
Aureolas
‘Evenson is an American writer who sets out to disturb and unsettle his readers. He certainly succeeds with his latest collection of modern horror stories…All very weird, but somehow Evenson pulls it off.’
Daily Mail
‘Stories that will not only unnerve and unsettle you, but also chill you to the bone…The ordinary becomes extraordinary and then terrifying. Shades of Kafka. Shadows of Stephen King. Each story brings a new sense of unease and dread. Horror storytelling at its best.’
North & South
‘To a reader unfamiliar with Evenson’s unique cadence of nastiness, his latest collection of short stories, A Collapse of Horses, is the ideal introduction. Evenson moves through the genres—Western, science fiction, childhood reminiscence, ghost story, found document, confession—and finds ways to make them eerier. His open sentences are often striking…attention snagged our expectations are more than fulfilled.’
Times Literary Supplement
New York Times
‘There is not a more intense, prolific or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson.’
George Saunders
‘Evenson’s fiction is equal parts obsessive, experimental and violent. It can be soul-shaking.’
New Yorker
‘Brian Evenson is one of the treasures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes and Co., but also to Edgar Allan Poe.’
Jonathan Lethem
‘One of the most provocative, inventive and talented writers we have working today.’
Believer
‘Evenson is interested in philosophy and semiotics, the impossibility of ever truly knowing or naming the world, and our fundamental, helpless dependence on what our senses tell us…[His stories] are a wonderful feat of the uncanny.’
Los Angeles Review
‘Violence is punishing but unbelievably subtle in Evenson’s delicate, minimalist stories. And ultimately, there is something cosmic — something utterly Lovecraftian, but without the baroque language — about this type of horror: Beneath the slippery, often abstruse plots lies a vast gulf of nothingness, in the purest and most unsettling sense of the word.’
NPR
‘This new collection, released alongside new editions of three of his older works, offers a great summation of Evenson’s strengths as a writer.’
Vol. 1 Brooklyn
‘A Collapse of Horses is a stunning collection of disparate tales of existential terror, which could serve as a good introduction to readers who are not familiar with his work. However, allow your reviewer to warn you: once you have read Evenson, you will want to read all of Evenson; yet beware, like most addictions, it is a dangerous pursuit and one not easy to pass through unscathed.’
Brooklyn Rail
‘You never realize how deep his fiction has wormed its way into your brain until hours, days, even weeks later, when you’re lying in the dark and Evenson’s images come flooding back, unbidden. A Collapse of Horses will stay with you for a long time…whether you want it to or not.’
Chicago Review of Books
‘Brian Evenson is one of the most consistently vital and unnerving voices in writing today…No matter where you start with Evenson’s work, the door is wide ajar, and once you go through it you won’t be coming out.’
VICE
‘Evenson’s stories, small masterworks of literary horror, are elegantly tense. They operate in psychological territory, never relying on grossness or slasher silliness to convey their scariness…For the Stephen King fan in the house: an author as capable, if a touch less prolific.’
Kirkus
‘A Collapse of Horses is a master class in unnerving storytelling; seventeen short narratives that range from horror to science fiction and from surrealism to noir. The variety is outstanding, the writing is superb, but what makes this collection deserving of attention is how Evenson manages to achieve a perfect balance between what is on the page and what is left out.’
Electric Literature
‘While they run the gamut of genres, these stories all lie in the same orbit of dark gravity: a field of dust, blood, head trauma, inert flesh, semicorporeal stuff and fear– mainly the terror of what we’re capable of.’
Rumpus
‘A collection of 17 powerful and sometimes very weird stories, some of which will send a shiver up the spine of the most well-balanced reader. Brian Evenson has a genuinely original imagination and a strong stomach.’
Sydney Morning Herald
‘A Collapse of Horses is a masterclass of the horror short story…Many of these tales will likely have readers leaving their lights on well after they put the book down.’
Aureolas
‘Evenson is an American writer who sets out to disturb and unsettle his readers. He certainly succeeds with his latest collection of modern horror stories…All very weird, but somehow Evenson pulls it off.’
Daily Mail
‘Stories that will not only unnerve and unsettle you, but also chill you to the bone…The ordinary becomes extraordinary and then terrifying. Shades of Kafka. Shadows of Stephen King. Each story brings a new sense of unease and dread. Horror storytelling at its best.’
North & South
‘To a reader unfamiliar with Evenson’s unique cadence of nastiness, his latest collection of short stories, A Collapse of Horses, is the ideal introduction. Evenson moves through the genres—Western, science fiction, childhood reminiscence, ghost story, found document, confession—and finds ways to make them eerier. His open sentences are often striking…attention snagged our expectations are more than fulfilled.’
Times Literary Supplement
February 17, 2026
The good ones: “The Punish”, “A Collapse of Horses”, “Cult”, “Seaside Town”, “The Dust”, “Scour”, “Past Reno”, “The Window, “Click”
Displaying 1 - 30 of 464 reviews